Fact-Checking an Offshore Trust Guide Against the Case Law

A detailed guide to offshore asset protection trusts has been circulating on LinkedIn, published by attorney Brian T. Bradley of Bradley Legal Corp. Much of it is accurate, and parts of it are genuinely well done. But its three offshore case summaries do not match the decisions they cite, and one of them is contradicted by the guide itself a few paragraphs later.

We hold published case-law claims to a simple standard: read the decision, compare what it held to what is claimed, and show your work. We applied it to the "45 FAPT Cases Gone Wrong" list and its successors, and we apply it here the same way, to a piece that is broadly on our side of the argument. We are an offshore asset protection law firm and the Cook Islands Trust is the structure we focus on, so read our analysis with that in mind, and check the sources yourself.

What the Guide Is, and What It Gets Right

The article, "Offshore Asset Protection Trust Guide", walks through domestic asset protection trusts, fully offshore trusts, and a hybrid product before recommending the hybrid. Before the corrections, credit where it is due:

• Its domestic-trust case law checks out. Battley v. Mortensen, In re Huber, Toni 1 Trust v. Wacker, Kilker v. Stillman, and the 2026 United States v. Huckaby decision are all real and fairly summarized. We verified each.
• Its description of Cook Islands law is broadly accurate - non-recognition of foreign judgments, short limitation periods, a criminal-standard burden of proof for fraud claims, and licensed, regulated trustees.
• Its core jurisdictional point is one we have made ourselves: U.S. courts can bind people within their reach; they cannot directly compel an independent foreign trustee operating under foreign law.

That is what makes the offshore case summaries worth correcting. A guide this detailed will be believed, including the parts that are wrong.

United States v. Grant: Contempt Was Denied, Not Found

The guide says:

"In United States v. Grant, 2011 WL 13204229 (S.D. Fla.), involving IRS enforcement efforts against offshore trusts, U.S. courts issued repatriation orders and contempt findings — yet the foreign trustees did not surrender the assets."

The repatriation order is real. The contempt findings are not, and the difference is the whole case.

The government held a $36 million tax judgment and obtained an order in 2005 directing Arline Grant to repatriate the assets of two offshore trusts her late husband had settled decades earlier, one in Jersey and one in Bermuda - not, incidentally, in the Cook Islands. She wrote to the trustees requesting distributions. She dismissed the trustees. They refused. When the government moved to hold her in contempt in 2008, the court denied the motion: a party who cannot comply with an order cannot be jailed for not complying, and on the evidence, her powers on paper did not translate into actual control.

The 2011 order the guide cites did not change that. It granted injunctive relief under 26 U.S.C. § 7402(a) after Mrs. Grant began moving trust money to herself through her children's accounts - conduct that finally demonstrated some practical reach, and to which federal tax liens had already attached. Our case-by-case review of this and forty-four other cited cases found no contempt finding against her at any stage.

So Grant stands for nearly the opposite of the sentence quoted above. It is the leading modern example of a court accepting the impossibility defense because control had genuinely been surrendered, decades before the tax judgment existed. Compressing it to "repatriation orders and contempt findings" converts the strongest authority for properly built offshore planning into a generic stonewall story.

SEC v. Solow: The Trust Was Never Tested, and the Guide Says So Itself

In its showcase of offshore cases, the guide says:

"In SEC v. Solow, 554 F. Supp. 2d 1356 (S.D. Fla. 2008), a federal court confronted a similar situation involving offshore entities and trusts. The trustee declined to comply with U.S. enforcement efforts and the assets remained outside U.S. reach."

Then, twenty lines later, discussing the impossibility defense:

"When a settlor manufactures his own inability to comply, courts do not excuse it — in SEC v. Solow, 554 F. Supp. 2d 1356 (S.D. Fla. 2008), the court called it self-created penury and refused to let it defeat enforcement."

The second passage is accurate. The first is wrong in nearly every particular, and the two cannot both be true.

What the record shows: a jury found Jamie Solow liable for securities fraud. After the verdict, assets were shifted to his wife, who then settled a Cook Islands trust with them. When Solow paid only nominal amounts toward the roughly $6 million judgment, the court held him in civil contempt and ordered him incarcerated - not because a foreign trustee defied anyone, but because his claimed poverty was self-created. No enforcement order was ever directed at the Cook Islands trustee. The court never tested the trust. The contempt was about his post-verdict transfers to his wife.

"The assets remained outside U.S. reach" is not a description of Solow. It reads like a summary of a different case pasted under the wrong caption - which is exactly the failure mode that produces bad case lists, in either direction.

FTC v. Affordable Media: The Fact the Summary Leaves Out

The guide's summary of the Anderson case is accurate as far as it goes: assets went into a Cook Islands trust, the court ordered repatriation, the trustee refused, the Ninth Circuit upheld civil contempt against the settlors, and, in the guide's words, "the structure survived even though the defendants themselves were jailed."

What it never mentions is why the contempt stuck. The Andersons were the trust's own protectors, holding the power to force the foreign trustee to repatriate assets. They had previously taken more than $1 million out of the trust. And they attempted to resign as protectors only after the FTC exposed the role. The Ninth Circuit upheld the contempt finding because their impossibility claim was not credible while they retained that control.

That omission matters twice. First, it leaves the reader thinking contempt is an ambient risk of offshore trusts, when the contempt cases consistently trace to retained control, concealment, or post-claim transfers. Second, the omitted fact is an uncomfortable one for any structure marketed on the promise that the settlor keeps control until trouble arrives. Affordable Media is not a warning about offshore trusts. It is a warning about holding onto powers you claim to have given up.

Why the Same Errors Keep Circulating

When we reviewed the "45 FAPT Cases Gone Wrong" list and the 20- and 28-case compilations that preceded it, we found identical case characterizations, and identical errors, repeating across lists that appear independent. Summaries travel; decisions mostly go unread. Those lists spun the errors against offshore trusts. This guide spins them in favor. The failure mode is the same, and so is the fix: read the decision before repeating the summary.

To be clear, as we said about the lists: this is not an accusation of bad faith against the author. It is how citation without verification behaves, whichever side it lands on.

The Principle the Guide Gets Right, and Where It Cuts

The guide closes on a principle we would co-sign without edits:

"What failed, failed for the same few reasons every time: the settlor kept control he should have given up, or he waited until the claim was already in view."

That is what the case law actually teaches. It is why Grant ended without contempt and Affordable Media ended with it. It is also a principle worth applying evenly, including to the guide's own recommendation: a hybrid structure in which the settlor keeps day-to-day control until a protector declares an "event of duress" and shifts the trust offshore at the moment a legal threat lands. The guide states that at that moment "no new trust is created" and "no assets are transferred."

Maybe a court will one day agree. What we can say today is narrower and, we think, more useful: no reported decision has tested that mechanic. No published case has ruled on whether a duress-triggered transition, executed in response to a claim, withstands a fraudulent-transfer or retained-control challenge. The cases the guide itself cites reward control surrendered before trouble and punish control held until it arrives. Anyone weighing that structure should at minimum know the question is open, because the guide does not say so.

The Record Is Public

The decisions are public, our full case-by-case review is public, and readers deserve descriptions of both that survive contact with the opinions themselves.